Farming is infinitely variable. On Tuesday we cleaned out the drier, the dirtiest task of the year and on Friday we enjoyed our first ram sale of the year.

This year, I am handing over the responsibility of the grain drying to Logan, whose main job is looking the cattle. He hasn’t operated a grain drier before, so I will spend the first few days with him.

When I moved to Roxburgh Mains 28 years ago, coming from a hill farm, I had never even seen a grain drier, far less operated one. Our first harvest was quite a learning curve. Happily, a local man who had worked in a commercial drier held my hand.

Our machine, an Alvan Blanch continuous flow model, looked pretty intimidating at the start but I soon got to know its wheezes, whines and rattles. At that time, we had 400 acres of grain, split equally between oats, barley, OSR and winter wheat. We need the oats and barley to feed our sheep and cattle.

But, we no longer grow the rape and wheat and have sown that area down to grass. Wheat was always the biggest challenge to the drier as it was usually harvested in mid-September.

In the sodden harvest of 1998, we harvested the wheat at 27% moisture. When we took a bucketful out of the huge reeking pile the imprint of the bucket remained like the wheat was cheese. The drier churned away 24 hours a day and we had to put the grain through twice to get it down to market spec'.

Last week, my son and I attended the Beltex sale at Carlisle. A year ago, for the first time, we tupped the pedigree Texel and Suffolk hoggs with lambs we borrowed. The experiment was sufficiently successful, so on Friday we ventured into the market.

The selection process involved setting aside any previous experience. The conflict arose, as it often does, between choosing between length and hindquarter.

I had never seen backends like these before and the size of the gigot was largely the determinant of the sale price. Too many bad days in the spring had made me wary of bare heads, however there was no other option and, unlike with their Texel brethren, the bluer the better.

The rams had very little wool. Whether this was genetic, or whether due to very late shearing was hard to judge. Without doubt the Beltex has an unparalleled ability to deliver a top-quality butchers’ lamb, but I wonder whether the extreme bareness of coat has become an obsession and might have repercussions on a bad lambing day.

We bought a shearling for 2000gns and were in to 6000gns on another. We didn’t get him, so we'll need to try again at a later sale.

The buying process echoed a similar breed trial I made about 50 years ago. My father and my grandfather had successfully used Border Leicester rams over North Country Cheviots and Blackies for most of the 20th century.

In the 1960s, the poor profitability of sheep led to many of the flocks of Scotch Half-breds on local arable farms being sold. As the market for our Half-bred ewe lambs was greatly reduced by that, my dad decided to breed all the Northies pure instead of crossing the bottom half with the Border.

A little later, in the early 1970s, the Greyface became increasingly replaced by the Mule. Consequently, our Greyface ewe lambs had no breeding premium, so I decided to move to Bluefaced Leicesters.

The BFL then, wasn’t the sheep it is today. They were rangier. Their forelegs often came out of the same hole and finding a ram that was correct in the mouth was virtually impossible.

The latter only improved when Welsh flockmasters, armed with decent cheque books, started buying. They wouldn’t touch any ram that was overshot in the jaw, so Northern breeders had to change.

The crossing type of BFL certainly existed in the North of England but hadn’t appeared at the Kelso Ram Sale at that time, so our only option was what are now called 'the traditional type'.

Having been brought up among Cheviots and Blackies, I thought that the BFLs were the ugliest sheep I had ever seen. I was advised to buy something as blue and as bare as possible. Somebody told me that the breed ideal looked like a snake sticking its head out of a hole in a bag.

As Mule ewe lamb sales were booming, the rams at Kelso were a good trade. My budget then was rather less that it was last Friday, at Carlisle, for the Beltex. I bought a Blue ram from George Murray, of West Horton, for £120 and a second from Edmund Hankey, Esh Hall, in Co Durham for £45. Unlike many of the BFL rams I was to buy later, both lived long and productive lives.

The short life span of the increasingly expensive rams was a high annual cost. In 1980, a small but well-bred flock of BFLs came on to the market, so I bought the lot to breed my own rams.

If buying rams was expensive, breeding my own was ruinous. They had an inbuilt death wish.

We kept them inside until mid-May. The first cold day after we let them out resulted in the death of the best tup lamb. The second best succumbed in mid-June and on and on the process continued until I was left with something I never would have bought.

Many well-known flocks and herds start by trying to breed something for home use. Sometimes, as I found out, 'The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.'

We started our Aberdeen-Angus herd with the same objective. It worked out a wee bit better.